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To Camus or Not To Camus?

I’m not an existentialist but I know a prodding thing when I see one. Which is why Gina Myers’ sweet essay up at ColdFront today is timely — my students just read The Myth of Sisyphus and watched the films, “Woman In the Dunes” (Teshigahara adapted Kobe Abe’s book of the same title) and “The Savages“, and are currently writing an essay in which they take one of the absurdist roles Camus explores in the essay and compares/contrasts it to each of the protagonists in the films. This would make sense if I had time to explain or you were one of my students. Mostly, I was just noting the serendipity of Gina writing about The Myth and revealing lots about her own personality, like it or not, in Poets Off Poetry. Enjoy!

6 thoughts on “To Camus or Not To Camus?”

Great books, excellent essay. Living for the spirit
of things when things aren’t enough. Positive Existentialism.
I hope Saginaw is hit by some great thing some day. There’s
room. Sisyphus is good for any modern poet to ponder.
I like to add some Dostoevski.

I was happy to read it – I think it’s awesome you taught it – but there was this lingering feeling of “um, man is better than the gods because he rolls a stone down a hill and is aware he has to go pick it up again?” I mean, I’m not one of those people who uses the term “nihilism” in a bad way lightly, but I don’t know what else to call that.

I’m not sure how persistence in the
face of failure or the perception of
patterns in performance can be nihilism,
which would deny the doggedness. It is
an oblique connection, that’s true.
“The Plague” struck me like Gina struck
you, the first time through. The heart
hides, but it will not stop.
Good to see your philosophical face
pop up again Ashok!

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Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described Amy King's poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.”

King was honored by The Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees, and she received the 2012 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

She serves on the Executive Board for VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts, edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

King also co-edited Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples and currently co-edits the PEN Poetry Series and Esque Magazine with Ana Bozicevic.